Why you should read Bill Gates’ book about climate disaster
A brief book review about how Mr. Microsoft makes climate change and the urgency around action accessible to the layman.
Because of his great success in the computer software industry, Bill Gates has enjoyed unique access to people and places around the globe and he has been able to see first-hand how countries and governments are responding to global problems related to poverty, disease and access to health care.
Mr. Gates has been expanding his purview to now include the very related problems stemming from climate change. This book is written from his own personal, up close and EXCLUSIVE ACCESS viewpoint. Most of the examples he references are based on what he's come in direct contact with and his own passion for these topics seems sincere.
Should I read this book?
I do recommend this book for several reasons but mostly because here, as compared to the many other options on the bookstore shelves, the broad and often-challenging subject matter is quite easy to consume - especially for newcomers. Mr. Microsoft does a good job of touching on the full range of Climate Change issues and impacts and also the comprehensive and necessary Energy Transition. But he never gets too pedantic or too nerdy. So, try to ignore that it was written by a former Software Engineer and turn your attention instead to the topic(s) he covers in these pages.
The book is for everyone
It is likely that you fall into one of two camps when it comes to Climate Change:
You don't quite know how scary climate change is. Maybe you've been hearing about it more and more and feel like now might be the time to bone up a little. If this is you, then you will find this book does a great job at laying out the broad range of serious issues you should be aware of. You will certainly feel more informed and perhaps even motivated to get engaged!
You already understand that things are bad and getting worse throughout the world and you want to feel more positive about what might be done or at least where you can start. Mr. Gates does a fabulous job of creating and maintaining his optimism from the first page to the last.
“Just thinking about the scope of this problem can be dizzying. But it does not need to be paralyzing.” [p. 40]
There is a good chance that reading this book will help you expand on what you already know but it is certainly not a doomsday opus.
Bill's Big Ideas
I want to highlight my big takeaways here in part to tease you into digging in more but mostly to help relate the sources and scale of the issues involved.
TL;DR Electrify as much as we can, starting now, using only zero-carbon electricity
Bill acknowledges that we face significant hurdles in getting to net-zero emissions by 2050 - the prevailing goal for most countries and that these are more than technological, although he's bullish about our collective track record of stepping up when the world needs us (he includes lots of relevant references to the ongoing, global COVID response).
He also focuses attention on what governments can/need to do and the role the private sector can play too when it comes to investment and innovation.
The population is only getting bigger
This is perhaps obvious but the connection that needs to be made (and he does) is that more people on the planet - that are living longer thanks to improvements in diets and medicines - means more demand for energy. More people means more cars, more roads, more houses and buildings and such. These all require energy.
The author effectively ties in many of the adjacent problems to Climate Change and the Energy Transition including Energy Poverty:
"860 million people don't have reliable access to electricity." [p. 68]
But the less obvious insight is that, as standards of living continue to rise around the globe, an individual's demand for energy will also increase. Those people will also want cell phones and computers and air conditioning. So the energy per person is growing too!
Meeting soaring energy demand must NOT exacerbate greenhouse gas emissions
Bill Gates is part of an influential group of world leaders that want to help the poorest people thrive and that involves giving them access to the same conveniences (or luxuries!) that people in the wealthier countries enjoy. I have not found much evidence that we're trying to deny such access but in highlighting the inevitable growth in demand, Gates and others are emphasizing that we cannot continue using the same environmentally harmful methods that were and are still being used in the 1st world countries.
Clean Energy is the answer to Climate Change
More specifically, we need to find ways for clean, renewable energy to be more attractive than current fossil fuel energy options. Gates calls for "carbon-free" energy which interestingly enough, can include nuclear power plants since they do not emit GHG.
And before you get all bent out of shape, know that he does acknowledge the other hazards of nuclear energy and uses several pages to highlight his own investment in a company developing a new, better fission reactor.
"It's the only carbon-free energy source that can reliable deliver power day and night, though every season, almost anywhere on earth, that has been proven to work on a large scale." [p. 84]
I have come across similar points being made by other experts and will likely post another article here about how Carbon-Free is not synonymous with Hazard-Free.
My own highlights from the book
Believe me, I bookmarked, highlighted and dog-eared the heck out of this book. So much of it reinforced ideas I'd already come across and the rest helped me tie together loose threads that I knew were important but hadn't quite pulled together.
Here are some of my personal takeaways that I know will influence me on my own renewable path:
This is the first time we've transitioned our energy resources for reasons other than lower costs and higher energy efficiencies
“What’s more, the energy transition we need now is being driven by something that has never mattered before. In the past, we’ve moved from one source to another because the new one was cheaper and more powerful. When we stopped burning so much wood and started using more coal, for example, it was because we could get a lot more heat and light from a pound of coal than from a pound of wood.” [pp. 44-45]
It will be very difficult to combat climate crisis without updating legislation. Our laws, regulations and government standards are woefully out of date and weren't designed to deal with the relatively new realities of greenhouse gas emissions.
“One problem is that many of the environmental laws and regulations in place today weren’t designed with climate change in mind. They were adopted to solve other problems, and now we’re trying to use them to reduce emissions.
There are some sobering realities around renewable energy. I came into this space curious about renewable energy and quickly learned about what Bill Gates calls the "curse of intermittency." As much as I want to embrace and promote solar, wind and related clean energy sources, I find it sobering that these are not exactly cure-alls and that more is needed to make these technologies truly viable including improvements/innovations around transmission, energy storage and demand management.
In his book, he discusses how there is still much more progress that needs to be made in terms of adding more gigawatts of capacity every year:
That will be a bit easier as we make solar panels and wind turbines cheaper and even more efficient - that is, as we invent ways to get even more energy from a given amount of sunlight or wind. (The best solar panels today convert less than a quarter of the sunlight that hits them into electricity, and the theoretical limit for the most common type of commercially available panels is about 33 percent.)" [p. 80]
A small delight for me at least, was to see a prominent mention of pumped hydro as a viable energy storage option. I wrote about this earlier in my blog. Gates confirms that pumped hydro will be capable of storing “city-sized amounts of energy” and might be the biggest form of “grid-scale electricity storage” [p. 92]. He also clearly outlines why it isn’t more prevalent:
"You can probably guess why it hasn't really taken off. To pump water up a hill, you need a big reservoir of water and, of course, a hill. Without either, you're out of luck" [p. 93]
A final word
I hope I'm not ruining this for any would-be reader but there is no magic bullet to be found here. But you can't blame that on Bill Gates. He's one bright (and wealthy) man but it will take so much more than brainpower and money to get us to a better place. The ecological damages that came along with the Industrial Revolution have been growing and spreading for more than a century and we haven't done that much yet to really address the increasingly obvious sources. And yet, there is a growing set of people and organizations actively working on solutions and this should give us reasons be hopeful:
"No one has cornered the market on effective solutions to climate change. Whether you're a believer in the private sector, or government intervention, or activism, or some combination, there's a practical idea you can get behind." [p. 226]
And I do hope you get behind this Energy Transition!
For a much better overview, I would also encourage you to watch Bill Gates himself talking about his book on a 60 minutes interview, which is available on YouTube.